Just Another Day

Sitting here, as usual, well before daylight. I don’t know if it is from lack of sleep or something else, but I do not feel as strong as I have at other times. Practices long ago forsaken, lessons long ago learned, each time I feel good, each time I feel energetic or I feel that things are good, there’s nothing to worry about, I remind myself then, low times are again out there. Though I feel good now, I will not feel this way for ever. In fact, I probably won’t feel this way for very long. And this is not a bad outlook, or a poor attitude. Good times don’t last, Thank God, because then again neither do bad times, and if anything is constant it is that everything changes. (I’m trying to purge and eliminate redundancy from my writings) Are there times, as it seems, that I “see” further and better the true nature of things? I think probably. Even our ability to form accurate constructs of reality change from day to day, and if some days I can’t actually see into things more deeply, The Universe sure fooled me. In math we see this in linear algebra; that if we have at least one piece of information about every unknown, then we can ultimately solve the problem (morebetter, that the problem has a solution). In daily life, there are millions of variables and libraries of information to go along with that. I am not the county’s best mathematician nor the best problem solver, but no analysis can easily solve numerical problems involving greater than three equations and three unknowns; MY POINT BEING, it is not surprising that life is a mystery, and often we are doing very well with even our very best guesses (saving ourselves from the horrors of actual solutions which may not even exist). As time has passes, on those many and increasing days I am able to say “oh death, where is thy sting….”, I know it more and more better, life comes with its own “help” file, we go along “clicking” the question mark tab several times a day without even knowing it. Though a person cannot lose anything more than his or her life, and even there, the anxiety softens with time, ableing us to carry on in the face of great uncertainty. Cancer comes, we deal with it, accept it, and ultimately find ourselves more concerned about how well our cellular telephone is functioning than our lives themselves, and Thank God for that. Which isn’t to say, having long since dealt with it all, it doesn’t all come crashing back down to Earth again, making enormous noise at times (everything changes) scaring the hell out of us all over again. Even still, we are not even surprised when things are back to normal by that afternoon, and we are back to our merry selves. It’s like, I don’t know; it’s like feeling greatful for that horrible headache. It was almost worth having the headache to experience it going away. This particular crash (remember, I’m not feeling well again) I think came when I heard somebody mention how easy it was to learn the python computer programing language. I had a class in programing in college, and went on to use it at my job as a geologist many times. I enjoyed writing code and I was sad when it became less and less necessary for the general public to be able to compile little programs for themselves; little strings of computer logic to help us solve our own daily problems; to answer our own complex questions. Though I didn’t know it at the time, busy as I was, being a professional geologist/geophysicist, generating computer program code is soothing in the same way sewing is soothing. I became sad, because my mind’s voice said, well then, I must obtain and learn this “python”. The happier I became about learning python, the sadder I became knowing that I necessarily should limit myself on what I want to accomplish with my newly trimmed life expectancy. Good friends will tell me that I shouldn’t limit myself at all but it is me who hast to answer the question more expediently than most, do I want to finish a lot of things, or do I want to finish a few things but well (do I use a question mark here? I truly do not know). I “Mona Lisa” smile at myself when I remember Jonathan W. Thompson, versions 30.0 through 39.9. Having good days then meant that I had actually arrived at a new, happier state of being, the elusive wellness I felt was hard won war bounty which would endure and not fade. I have long since abandoned such stable and unchanging views of the world, trading them in for the reality that everything changes and I like it better this a way. I will gladly watch good moods pale for the knowledge that even my deepest “hell” is not permanent either, that I’d nearly endure that headache in order to know what it feels like when it goes away.